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Demolition Takes Shea Stadium Piece by Piece

Parts of Shea Stadium are removed every day as the Mets move toward opening day at Citi Field in April.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The carcass of Shea Stadium, still standing, awaits its final destruction.

The seats have been extracted, flattening three tiers into two colorless dimensions.

The bullpens are gone, leaving the rancid memory of last season’s meltdown by the Mets’ relievers. A sheared-off stump of steel that once held their bench remains.

The batter’s eye came down Saturday.

There isn’t much left of Shea anymore. Part of it disappears every day as the Mets move toward opening day at Citi Field in April.

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Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Already 10,000 of 16,000 pairs of its seats have sold for $869 each.

The 105-foot-tall foul poles will be cut into pieces for sale by the MeiGray Group in addition to all the Shea memorabilia it is marketing.

The home run apple is being shined for its display outside the new stadium. On Wednesday, the left-field bleachers were demolished so quickly that by late afternoon, nearly all traces had been carted off. Every day, trucks haul away the fragments of 44 years. Dumpsters stand by outside the skeletal remains of Shea.

Despite the rubble around it, the oversized Dunkin’ Donuts cup still stands.

The scoreboard is now a gnarled nest of steel. A small piece of it, with the circuitry that helped it flash numbers and letters, rested crookedly in center field.

The infield dirt, unwatered, is cracking. The outfield grass is beset by pattern baldness.

The track on which stands once slid to make Shea a football stadium has been unearthed. The twin light towers will be taken down any day to further clear the area beyond the outfield so the Mets can build the plaza wrapping around Citi Field.

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A locker in a pile of construction trash from Shea Stadium.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

“They’re so high, and so close to Mr. Wilpon’s new baby,” said Toby Romano, a vice president of Breeze National, the demolition subcontractor, said of the towers’ proximity to the nearly finished Citi.

“Nice and easy, we’ll pull them down,” said Danny Collins, a Breeze foreman.

“If it were me,” said Jeff Wilpon, the team’s chief operating officer, who wants Shea to be gone as soon as possible. “I’d just go in and bring them down.”

Collins, a veteran of demolishing skyscrapers, nonchalantly said the Shea razing was “like any other demolition,” but then called it a “great challenge” to tear down a place where, “I used to spend a lot of time with my uncles.”

In the outfield, wide tire tracks created by heavy equipment have furrowed the sod of Beltrán, Delgado and Wright. On the dirt infield sat three of the project’s Bobcats, the compact bulldozers that have been knocking down walls, concession stands, bathrooms, closets, clubhouses and offices.

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A photograph of the former Mets second baseman Doug Flynn.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Inside the field level, Bobcats have wrecked everything.

The lights were dim or absent, the concrete floor wet and muddy. It stank of demolition. Exposed wires hung from the ceiling.

Chunks of concrete were obstacles to anyone but the operator of a Bobcat.

Wilpon wanted to show the Mets’ clubhouse, now darkened and turned to rubble. But the menacing growl of an approaching Bobcat altered his route. Close by was the rear entrance to the ticket office. A large, ragged gash in a cinderblock wall made it appear that the Incredible Hulk had vented his frustrations over the work of Aaron Heilman.

Wilpon added: “I’d love to drive a Bobcat, blasting through this place.”

He confesses to a wee bit of nostalgia for the good times he and his family have had at Shea. But his priority is Citi Field. “You have to tear Shea down to get where you want to be,” he said, on the field where parking for 2,000 cars will be created.

The stripping of Shea has revealed even more of Citi, its elegant brickwork, archways and entrance rotunda. Until the final game, fans had to look past the scoreboard and home run apple to see it, but the view to the nearly finished ballpark is now unobstructed.

The letters of Citi Field light the night sky, so unlike the extinguished neon that colored the baseball characters on Shea’s outer wall. Soon, ramps created out of the stadium’s excavated concrete will let giant grapplers reach the upper deck’s exposed steel and pull it down. And Shea moves inexorably toward its end.